Andrés Trapiello, as seen by Carlos Pujol

Andrés Trapiello, by Carlos Pujol

In all time periods there have been petty "great writers" (citing one example will be enough: the first Nobel Prize winner in 1901, Sully-Prudhomme, anybody remembers him?); but in our time period in which the solemn lie and interested exaggeration are more noisy than ever, calling any writer "great" is so cheap, that it is almost embarrassing to use this adjective. And, nevertheless, I cannot resist the urge of using it with Andrés Trapiello, a singular and multiple writer with a personal voice, very personal, that is recognizable in each an everyone of his books; and who feels the necessity to explore very different territories so his testimony of the world can be the widest and most ambitious possible.

The titles published are already more than fifty, including poetry, essays, articles, biography, novel, and each reader can feel more or less related to the expression of each of them; in all of them we find an admirable verbal gift and a vehemence that may not always grant the author with friendship, but that leaves no one indifferent upon those pages that are never done by compromise or artificially, this is, the sweet-talk which we commonly find on other places.

Although its is in the long chronicle of his diaries, his Salón de pasos perdidos, where the writer feels more free, without the limitations of any mould. Diaries that are a passionate monologue facing the mirror and the diversity of the world that surrounds us, in all possible tones: lyric, satiric, meditative, descriptive, etc. The writer tells us his truth with simplicity and demand, reaching the depth of his soul with those "true words" in which we also recognize ourselves.